Stripe or Paddle, etc.
What have you all done in the past?
I'll be adding payments to Flowist.io finally, and not sure whether to do all the integration myself (Stripe) or use a service like Paddle.
Any advice would be great!
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I've had a great experience with Paddle. Easy to setup and good customer service. They take a bigger %, but if you get to the scale where that starts to make a big difference, then you could switch to Stripe!
That's great to hear - I've enjoyed their interface and their docs so far. And as @CADbloke mentioned, they'll handle compliance. Any nuances I should be aware of/difficulties you had?
The only caveat down the road is you want to move subscription customers to another payment provider, say from Paddle to Stripe. Spoiler: may not be worth moving them but then you have multiple payment providers, totally a first-world problem - "oh no, there is money coming at me from all directions".
You have to mention that you use them as your payment processor in your T&Cs. But otherwise pretty smooth!
Good to know! Thanks :)
the question is , will you have a lot of European consumers, B2C , if so , the MOR offering of paddle is compelling. you will only make one invoice / month and not to every customer taking into account the VAT if its country
I think that all of that depends on your technical skill background and what your current application is written in.
If you are using a modern framework (Django, Laravel, etc), then it is likely officially supported by the framework to integrate with Stripe.
Keep in mind, if you are still validating the idea -- focus on delivering a method for customers to pay. It's way too easy for product founders to over engineer in the early stages. Focus on offering a balanced method for customers to securely pay for you product, but also not require a lot of your effort up front.
Address the problems that you have today.
People often say "Yeah that looks cool, I would buy it" but only the bank account will validate if they truly mean it or not 😀
Thank you for the advice! I think I needed to hear that delivering a method for customers to pay is high priority. You're so right about the bank account being the only proof.
How much time do you want to spend implementing & maintaining and complying with what is essentially a non-core function of your business as opposed to just paying for someone else to fix that and getting on with your stuff? It also depends on whether a 3rd party solution has what you want.
There also Gumroad etc. Here is a massive related thread: https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/my-vat-moss-experience-so-far/2497/77
Hmm that's a good point. I think the setup wouldn't be time-consuming as Strip docs are pretty great, and I'm not new to hooking into third-party api's etc. But dealing with compliance...that's a great point! Haha I definitely don't want to spend time doing that if I don't have to.
I think of it as "how many extra sales would I need to pay someone to make the whole eCommerce / VAT etc compliance / time-spent problem go away" - not many sales, really.
I'm using Paddle for LocaleData.com. The development experience is not the best (but not the worst, too), but I'm from Europe and the fact that they are a Merchant of Record is a game changer for me. If you need to deal with VAT, I can recommend Paddle.